“I’m just like my country, I’m young, scrappy and hungry,” Alexander Hamilton raps early in “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash hit 2015 Broadway musical now settling into San Francisco’s SHN Orpheum Theatre for a second time around.

That relentless drive is palpable from the first moment of the show, and not just in the character of the headstrong and ambitious young immigrant from the Caribbean who became one of the nation’s Founding Fathers and its first Secretary of the Treasury.

Miranda’s magnificently constructed score of the sung-through musical just keeps building on itself, beautifully weaving in echoes of earlier songs while getting practically each new one stuck in your head. Miranda’s intricate rhymes and rhythms just keep going and flowing from one song to the next. Intermission aside, it really is nonstop.

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Living up to the hype may sound like the least one could ask from a show, but with this Tony-, Pulitzer- and Grammy Award-winning sensation that’s a very high bar, and this production meets it phenomenally. There’s some historical revisionism in its loving portrait, to be sure, but it’s ingeniously crafted and electric in its energy.

Cast, as always, primarily with actors of color, the San Francisco ensemble is sizzlingly strong, the same cast that played Puerto Rico this January where Miranda played the lead. A couple of the performers were also seen here in 2017 on the first national tour, Isaiah Johnson as George Washington and Rubén J. Carbajal as friend John Laurens and son Philip Hamilton.

Donald Webber Jr. makes a compelling sardonic narrator as the coolly cagey Aaron Burr, whose path keeps crossing with Hamilton’s until he feels he’s been crossed too many times. Julius Thomas III’s Hamilton is full of overeager enthusiasm, champing at the bit to leave his mark on the world and rarely mindful of his tongue. Small wonder Burr advises him to “Talk less, smile more.”

Isaiah Johnson is a marvelously forceful Washington, brimming with gravitas, and Rick Negron is hilariously aloof as a Britpop cabaret-singing King George III. Simon Longnight is winningly animated as Lafayette but incomprehensible through his faux-French accent, while his strutting Jefferson is amusingly cocky, with his fancy finery and Kid ’n Play hair.

Rubén J. Carbajal is touchingly boyish as son Philip, seen as a sweet, eager-to-please 9-year-old and as a devoted but rash teenager with something to prove. Brandon Louis Armstrong is a boisterous presence as pal Hercules Mulligan and a dignified, haughty Madison.

It’s a very male story told from a very male perspective, especially in its treatment of an affair that Hamilton purportedly just stumbles into. Even so, Julia K. Harriman is radiant as devoted wife Eliza, and Sabrina Sloan is magnetically formidable as her savvy sister Angelica, whose song “Satisfied” is one of the show’s many highlights.

Helmed by original director Thomas Kail, the production makes marvelous use of David Korins’ spacious and spare set, like an antique brick-walled warehouse with plenty of wooden walkways and ropes. Andy Blankenbuehler’s dynamic choreography makes superb use of a revolving disc. Paul Tazewell’s costumes enchantingly evolve from subdued cream-colored ensemble outfits to bright colors as the budding nation comes into its own.

The real knockout, however, is Miranda’s superb score, a potent mix of hip-hop, R&B, pop, Broadway ballads, swinging jazz and pretty much everything in between. It’s all propulsively played by the orchestra led by music director Lily Ling and potently performed by the knockout cast.

From its cabinet meeting as rap battle to its heartbreaking portrait of unfathomable loss, it’s one dizzying, dazzling journey – -stirring, poignant, hilarious, touching and explosively exciting. One theme that comes up again and again is “who tells your story,” and in that respect the “ten-dollar Founding Father without a father” has really lucked out.

Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.

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